Your weekly post on higher education

Lots o’ stuff to chat about in the higher education universe, but let’s keep it to three items in this blog post: 1) My student-soon-to-be-Doctor-of-Philosophy Patrick Meier and Chris Albon blog "Advice to Future PhDs from 2 Unusual Graduating PhDs." They make some interesting, provocative, and dare I say counterintuitive arguments. I disagree with a ...

I disagree with a couple of their points. First of all, I ain’t buying "the blog is the new CV." The blog is a calling card, and if you’re lucky it’s a branding device — but it’s not the same thing as a vita. Second of all, I think they tend to inductively generalize from their own experiences and capabilities. Not everyone should take on outside projects or teach at every opportunity, because these are excellent not-writing-your-dissertation activities. Finally, I think their seven pieces of advice are out of sequence. Their #3, #6 and #7 are the most important things. Only once you’ve answered those questions should you even consider following the rest of their advice. Still, read the whole thing.

2) I see that Naomi Schaefer Riley got fired from her Chronicle of Higher Education gig for writing a 500 word blog post bashing dissertations-in-progress in African-American studies without reading them. Riley has written her response on the Wall Street Journal op-ed page. James Joyner provides an excellent round-up of the affair. My take is similar to Joyner in that, to be blunt, neither the Chronicle nor Riley come out of this looking very good. The Chronicle looks like it kowtowed to the pressures of academic political correctness by either not reacting sooner or standing their ground. Riley, on the other hand, has put herself in the indefensible position of calling for greater academic rigor while whinging that those standards shouldn’t apply to her when she blogs for the Chronicle. So, a pox on everyone’s house for this affair.

There’s real irony here in a Republican-controlled House of Representatives voting to defund a political-science program at a time when the Department of Defense and “intelligence community” seem to be increasing spending on it. With things like the Minerva Initiative,ICEWS, IARPA’sOpen Source Indicatorsprograms, the parts of the government concerned with protecting national security seem to find growing value in social-science research and are spending accordingly. Meanwhile, the party that claims to be the stalwart defender of national security pulls in the opposite direction, like the opposing head on Dr. Doolittle’sPushmi-pullyu. Nice work, fellas.

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